Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
6.3.3
Cultural Risks
With outsourced test projects, where the majority of the team is located at offshore
locations, communication and cultural risks pose the biggest threats to the project.
With more and more software testing being offshored to lower-cost countries in
Asia and eastern Europe, cultural issues play a major risk factor, as different cul-
tures have different working environments, different values, different expectations,
and different productivity.
6.3.4
Process Risks
Suppose a project is being executed by a company whose employees have experience
working on similar projects but have not adopted any formal process methodology for
executing those projects. Consider now that the same project is taken over by a company
whose employees have mature processes and apply sophisticated processes in executing
their projects. Do you think schedule, costs, quality, and effectiveness of testing will be
the same? No! There will be a vast difference. In fact, nowadays some outsourcing ser-
vice providers have devised elaborate, well-defined processes for testing different kinds
of applications. These specialized services provide good value for the projects.
6.3.5
Size
The bigger the project, the bigger the risk, as complexity increases manifold com-
pared to an increase in size. This leads to a higher rate increase in defects compared
to an increase in size. At the same time, tasks required to manage development and
testing of larger projects increase at a proportionally higher rate. As one gains expe-
rience from working on larger projects, one learns about managing them.
...
Challenges
Understanding software defects, finding defects, and reporting them does not
ensure that the software quality has improved. Fixing those defects indeed improves
software quality.
To mitigate damages caused by risks, you first need to evaluate risks correctly
and the impact they may have on your project. Once this is done, you can then
think of trade-offs. For example, hiring a less experienced software test engineer is
a risk too.
In outsourced projects, the biggest risk factor from the customer's perspective is
quality because most of the engagements are on a time and material basis. On proj-
ects that are of fixed cost-fixed time type, the biggest risk factor is cost or time over-
run. So type and impact of risks also depend on the type of outsourcing contract.
